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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

All The Trappings (Sketch #4) 10.17.2010

Here I Am 10.20.2010

Quarry 10.16.2010

I had this dream last week where I was sitting at a table with 5 other people, I can't tell or I don't remember who they are. A crow is sitting in the middle of the table and starts to come towards me. It is getting ready to peck my face off. A hawk swoops down from over the shoulder of the person sitting across from me, body checks the crow away from my face and then brushes its beak against my cheek which I interpreted as a kiss. I woke up thinking it had happened because I had felt the hawks beak against my cheek.

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I have been making little shadow boxes from the wooden packaging that my former boss Djerba had given to me this summer. I have decided to call them sketches under the body of work "All the Trappings". The image at the top of this post is sketch #4. If you would like to see more of them I have posted them here. The boxes use to house dolls. I like to think about the boxes as rooms between rooms in a building. A doll house?

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I have been going through the archives of This American Life again while at work. Yesterday I listened show #146 Urban Nature from 1999. I got particularly excited over David Rakoff's piece.

Act One. Interpretation OfDreams.

Building everything that comprises modern life—constructing cities and suburbs both—means trampling nature. And that bothers some people. They want to keep nature at hand, even in the city. David Rakoff visited Reykjavik, Iceland, where the government is careful not to disturb certain boulders when it builds roads because some people believe that invisible "hidden people"—like elves—live at those sites. (17 minutes)

The part of the piece I have been thinking about when Rakoff talks about theurban Reykjaviks' belief or wanting to believe in the stories of the "hiddenpeople".

the yearning quality of the stories. These tales are the vestiges of apre-urban time. Urbanization is intrinsically a violent process. It elicits a terrified nostalgia and possibly guilt. We hold fast to what we feel we are destroying.